Live Review: Sloan @ Manhattan, Sat Oct 23, 2010

During the course of Sloan’s show this past Saturday night in Moncton, I pondered how often I had seen them play. The answer was 13 times – more than any other band I have seen live. Frankly, not everyone of those 13 shows I have seen have knocked my socks off. The past four or five times I have seen them however, I have been thoroughly de-socked, including their latest Moncton show. It had been approximately two years since Sloan had last visited the Hub City, their last appearance having been in support of Lenny Kravitz at the Moncton Coliseum where they were (naturally) given a finite amount of time to play before Kravitz took the stage.

Opening their show with their 1999 single Losing California, Sloan proceeded to rock the sizeable crowd assembled at the Manhattan, following that up with other knockout tracks like Pen Pals, The Lines You Amend and Underwhelmed in the first four songs.

From there, the group took fans on a journey through album tracks that was simply awesome. As often as I have seen Sloan in concert, I had never heard them play songs such as The NS, So Beyond Me, C’mon C’mon and Don’t You Believe A Word live. I thought it was great to see and hear them being somewhat self-indulgent rather than just aiming to please the crowd gathered by resorting to playing “the hits”.

Ultimately though, the crowd was beyond pleased and gladly stayed with the band and were in turn rewarded with an enviable string of hits at the end of their main set including The Rest of My Life, Money City Maniacs, Everything You’ve Done Wrong and The Other Man all before the encore. For the encore, the group trotted out a cover of Eric’s Trip’s song Smother before wrapping the night up with I Am The Cancer and The Good In Everyone.

Not only do Sloan make excellent music, they are also extremely gracious and appreciative on stage, mentioning at a few different points in the show how much they love playing Moncton. You could tell these sentiments were genuine and not the by-product of attempting to kiss the crowd’s ass.